It was important to me to show our heroes stop for a minute to discuss following Brigitte, as opposed to just racing after her since the letter has a giant “!” floating over it. This conversation happened in the original game as well (albeit not word for word, this all happened years ago now). It’s interesting to think what I’d have done with the comic if our heroes had decided to call it a day, as by this point in the original campaign I was already drawing the comic.

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News and stuff!

Justin Hubbell over at Orcs vs Feminism reviewed Clockworks yesterday, and had many nice things to say! Go take a look. (And give Orcs vs Feminism a read, it’s good stuff.)

In creating the current Clockworks page, I ended up deleting what would have been the next Clockworks page. I think (clearly) that this was the right idea and figured (perhaps erroneously) some of you might be interested in reading me ramble about it.

Here’s the original 4 page sequence from 0180 on. (Click to embiggen)

Here’s the pages that are up now, without the deleted page:

I don’t think, aside from the information that our heroes aren’t in a hurry, there’s anything we really miss from the deleted page. Some of the dialog is fun, but it basically tells us stuff the readers already know. I don’t think anyone read Page 0182 on the site and went “Wait, why is he cutting the red wire? Why didn’t that work? What’s happening now!?” It’s 2015, and I don’t think anyone reading the comic needs to be explained how stopping a bomb works in fiction. It was better I think to move the story along and keep things fast paced (for a glacially updated webcomic).

But, it was also worth it to write all of that out, if only for my own benefit of keeping Oliver’s voice fresh in my head, for the next time he does talk.

The new sequence also does one of the things I really like about comics, where the time between panels is entirely elastic. Some time has obviously passed between panels 1 and 2 of page 0182, but how much is kind of in the imagination of the reader. Did our heroes discuss Plan B? Did Oliver look over the bomb and say all of that stuff from the deleted page off panel? We don’t really know, and like a lot of comic storytelling it all happens between the panels. I like that.

So yeah. Edit your stuff. Cut out pages or sequences or entire chapters that don’t need to be there. It’s good for you. This can be tricky in a serial webcomic format, as once it’s up it’s generally up, so you need to do things a bit out of order compared to making a graphic novel or regular novel or what have you.

Page 0182 delayed until next week. The page is all written and drawn, I just need to scan in everything and put it all together in Photoshop, but between my sleep being completely insane right now and work I won’t have time to do that until Sunday at the earliest. Ideally the next page will be up on Monday. To tide you over, here’s a sneak peak.